James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.
Beaumont and Fletcher
Calamity is man’s true touchstone.
Devil take the hindmost.
Discretion / And hard valour are the twins of honour, / And, nursed together, make a conqueror; / Divided, but a talker.
Discretion, the best part of valour.
Man is his own star, and the soul that can / Render an honest and a perfect man, / Commands all light, all influence, all fate; / Nothing to him falls early or too late.
No friend a friend until he shall prove a friend.
Nothing is a misery, / Unless our weakness apprehend it so; / We cannot be more faithful to ourselves / In anything that’s manly, than to make / Ill-fortune as contemptible to us / As it makes us to others.
Nothing is thought rare / Which is not new and followed; yet we know / That what was worn some twenty years ago / Comes into grace again.
Our natures are like oil; compound us with anything, yet still we strive to swim upon the top.
There is a method in man’s wickedness, / It grows by degrees.
They that are above have ends in everything.